Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 5 ·
Equal Rights Amendment
Chapter 5 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “The ERA and the Backlash”
Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment on 22 March 1972, and 22 states ratified it that year, reaching 30 by March 1973, with 38 needed. In autumn 1972 Phyllis Schlafly founded STOP ERA, and a counter-movement organised largely by women stalled ratification until the amendment failed.
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The map above is the world of Women’s rights, 30 June 1982 — The ERA deadline: 35 ratified, five rescinded, 15 never.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Equal Rights Amendment shows that the way a political system counts support can decide whether a protest movement wins, and that a movement can also generate an opposing movement that defeats it. The ERA was a proposed addition to the US Constitution whose key sentence read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Amending the Constitution is deliberately hard, much like changing the rules of a club that demand a supermajority vote: after two-thirds of both houses of Congress approve, three-quarters of the states, 38 of 50, must ratify. Congress passed the ERA on 22 March 1972, Hawaii ratified it within hours, and the map’s sequence of snapshots shows 22 states turning blue that year. Then, abruptly, the momentum stopped, and the rest of this chapter explains why.
The amendment failed because a counter-movement of conservative women, led by the Illinois activist Phyllis Schlafly and her organisation STOP ERA, persuaded enough state legislators that it threatened homemakers. Schlafly argued that the ERA would send women to war, end wives’ legal claims to financial support and lead to unisex toilets, and she linked it to abortion and gay rights. Only thirteen more states ratified after 1972, five tried to withdraw their ratification (the hatch), and when the extended deadline passed on 30 June 1982 the fifteen states that never ratified turned charcoal: most of the South, the Mormon West, and Illinois. A majority of Americans told pollsters they supported the ERA, yet a determined minority concentrated in enough legislatures was able to block it. Much of its content arrived anyway by other routes, through courts and ordinary laws.
The full story
The ERA began with enormous momentum because almost everyone in power claimed to support it. Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party had first drafted an amendment in 1923, both major parties had endorsed it in their platforms for decades, and by 1972 President Nixon, a growing number of trade unions and the new women’s organisations all backed it. The Senate passed it by 84 votes to 8. On the map the first snapshot shows 22 states ratifying within nine months, many with little debate: Hawaii on the same day, then New Hampshire, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas within about a week. By March 1973 the total reached 30, and only eight more were needed. The speed of the early votes concealed a weakness, because legislators who ratify without debate have not been persuaded and can be unpersuaded.
The backlash, a counter-movement that mobilises against the gains of another, was organised above all by women, which made it far more effective than opposition from men alone. In February 1972 Phyllis Schlafly, a Republican activist from Alton, Illinois, published “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?”, and that autumn she founded STOP ERA, whose initials she said stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges”. Her volunteers, many recruited through churches, brought home-baked bread to state legislators and testified that the ERA would draft daughters into combat and abolish a husband’s duty to support his wife. The three arrows show her campaign reaching into the states that never ratified. Nebraska rescinded, or withdrew, its ratification in March 1973, followed by Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota. After 1973 only five states ratified, the last being Indiana in January 1977, which left the total at 35, three short, and showed how quickly a counter-movement could freeze a cause that had seemed unstoppable.
The endgame showed how much depended on a few hundred state legislators. In 1978 Congress extended the deadline to 30 June 1982 after some 100,000 supporters marched in Washington, and NOW organised a boycott of conventions in unratified states. Illinois became the decisive battleground, partly because Schlafly lived there and partly because its constitution required a three-fifths majority for amendments, so even a House majority of 102 to 71 for the ERA in 1980 counted as a defeat. In June 1982 seven women fasted for 37 days in the Illinois capitol and others chained themselves outside the Senate chamber, but on 30 June the deadline passed and the fifteen charcoal states had never ratified. Courts had meanwhile begun to treat sex discrimination as suspect under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, which allowed opponents to argue that the ERA was unnecessary. The amendment failed, but much of the equality it promised arrived by quieter routes.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why the ERA lost
Historians agree that the ERA was defeated in state legislatures and disagree about why. Jane Mansbridge’s Why We Lost the ERA (1986), written by a political scientist who had campaigned for it, argues that both sides exaggerated its effects. Supporters promised a transformation to inspire volunteers, while the amendment’s likely legal impact was modest because courts were already moving, and those promises handed opponents their best arguments. When some feminists insisted that equality meant women must be drafted into combat, wavering legislators had their reason to vote no. Donald Critchlow emphasises Schlafly’s organisational genius, showing how STOP ERA turned conservative women into a disciplined grassroots network that later fed the New Right and the election of Ronald Reagan. Donald Mathews and Jane De Hart’s study of North Carolina argues that the ERA became a symbol in a wider conflict over gender roles, so legislators were voting on a way of life more than on a legal text. Marjorie Spruill traces how the rival conferences in Houston in 1977 split American politics into “women’s rights” and “family values”. Most explanations combine these elements, and they share one finding: the rules of ratification gave a passionate minority the power to defeat a lukewarm majority.
Can a state take back a ratification?
The five rescissions raised a constitutional question that has never been settled, because Article V of the Constitution, which sets out the amendment process, says nothing about withdrawing a ratification or about deadlines. The precedent was ambiguous. In 1868 Ohio and New Jersey tried to rescind their ratifications of the Fourteenth Amendment, and Congress counted them anyway. In December 1981 a federal judge in Idaho, Marion Callister, ruled in Idaho v. Freeman that rescissions were valid and that Congress’s 1978 extension of the deadline was unconstitutional. Yet he was himself a senior official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which actively opposed the ERA, and the Supreme Court declared the case moot once the deadline passed in 1982. The question returned when Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018) and Virginia (2020) ratified long after the deadline, and the legal status of the amendment remains disputed. The uncertainty matters for this atlas because it shows that the outcome of a protest campaign can depend on procedural rules written for other purposes, which is why movements so often end up fighting over process as fiercely as over principle.
Why did so many women oppose equal rights?
The most striking fact about the ERA’s defeat is that its most effective opponents were women, and historians have worked hard to explain why. Surveys from the late 1970s show that women were divided much as men were, but that the most committed opponents were often full-time homemakers, frequently active church members, while employed and college-educated women were the amendment’s strongest supporters. Mansbridge and Spruill argue that many homemakers heard the women’s movement as a judgement on their own lives. When feminists described housework as drudgery and dependence on a husband as a trap, women who had chosen that life felt devalued, and Schlafly offered them dignity, a political voice and a defence of the legal claims to support that protected wives who had no income of their own. Critchlow shows how these women became skilled political organisers, which is the paradox Schlafly herself embodied: a movement to defend women’s traditional roles drew women into public life. The episode has a parallel in this atlas’s second case study, where women in Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda argued in 2012 for a constitutional clause describing women as “complementary” to men. Protest movements regularly provoke counter-movements drawn from the very group they claim to represent.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A supermajority rule. Because 38 of 50 states had to ratify, opponents needed to hold only 13 states, and in each of them they needed to persuade only one chamber of the legislature. A movement that wins the national argument can still lose if its opponents are concentrated in enough places. The rule favoured the South and the Mormon West, where conservative churches were strongest and where the ERA was most easily presented as an attack on local values.
A counter-movement of women. STOP ERA was effective because it was led by women who spoke as homemakers defending the respect and security they believed the law gave them. Legislators could not easily dismiss it as men defending privilege. Schlafly also offered her followers a positive identity, the full-time wife and mother, at a moment when many felt that feminism looked down on them, so the backlash drew its strength from the same politics of identity that had built the women’s movement.
Abortion and the culture war. Abortion turned the ERA into a battle over the family: after Roe v. Wade in 1973, opponents argued that the ERA would also protect abortion and, later, gay rights, which drew Catholic, evangelical and Mormon churches into the campaign. By the late 1970s many of STOP ERA’s most active volunteers had been recruited through their congregations. The ERA ceased to be a narrow legal question and became a symbol in a wider conflict over the family. Each victory of one movement can hand its opponents a new reason to organise.
The decision lay with legislators. Ratification was decided by a few thousand state legislators, most of them men, many in part-time assemblies where personal lobbying mattered enormously. Polls showed majority support for the ERA nationally, but legislators heard most from the most intensely committed citizens, and in the late 1970s the most intense were the ERA’s opponents. In Illinois, Florida and North Carolina the decisive votes were lost by only a handful of legislators. Intensity often beats breadth in politics.
THE TURNING POINT
STOP ERA, autumn 1972. The founding of STOP ERA is the hinge because the pace of ratification changed almost at once. Twenty-two states ratified in 1972, eight in 1973, three in 1974, one in 1975, none in 1976 and one in 1977, and the first rescission came in March 1973. Before Schlafly organised, the ERA was a consensus measure that legislators passed without thinking; after she organised, it was a controversy that cautious legislators avoided. She proved that a counter-movement can defeat a protest movement by changing what a question is about, in this case from equal rights to the future of the family.
What it changed
Equality by other routes. Much of what the ERA promised arrived through courts and statutes: the Supreme Court’s rulings in Reed v. Reed (1971) and Craig v. Boren (1976) subjected sex discrimination to stricter review, meaning that courts demanded a strong justification for any law that treated men and women differently. Congress also passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974) and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978). The defeat of the symbol did not reverse the legal change already under way.
The rise of the New Right. The STOP ERA network became one of the foundations of a new conservative coalition of churches and grassroots activists. In 1980 the Republican Party dropped the support for the ERA it had held since 1940, and Ronald Reagan won the presidency. A “gender gap”, with women voting less Republican than men, appeared in that same election and has persisted since.
An amendment that never quite died. The ERA has been reintroduced in almost every Congress since 1982. Nevada, Illinois and Virginia ratified it between 2017 and 2020, taking the total to 38, but because the deadline had passed and five states had rescinded, its legal status remains disputed. The fight shows how a defeated cause can remain a symbol long after its practical purpose has been met elsewhere.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the ERA fail because of Phyllis Schlafly, or because of the rules for amending the Constitution?
Schlafly’s role was real and measurable: ratifications slowed sharply after STOP ERA formed, and her movement supplied the arguments, volunteers and pressure that turned wavering legislators in Illinois, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere. Yet the rules for amendment were what made her campaign decisive. A national poll majority was not enough when 13 states could block the change, when Illinois required a three-fifths vote, and when a deadline gave opponents a date by which they simply had to hold their ground. Some supporters also contributed to the defeat by overstating what the amendment would do, which gave Schlafly her best material, as Mansbridge argues. The most persuasive answer is that Schlafly turned a structural possibility into an actual defeat: without the supermajority rule her campaign could only have delayed the ERA, and without her campaign the rule would probably not have mattered. The transferable lesson is that the outcome of protest depends on the interaction between agency and institutions, because the same movement can win under one set of rules and lose under another.
An interesting fact
Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who did most to defeat an amendment designed to open careers to women, built a remarkable career of her own. She had run unsuccessfully for Congress in Illinois more than once, first in 1952, and her 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo sold about three million copies in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. In the middle of the ERA struggle, in her fifties, she earned a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1978. Her opponents pointed out the irony; her supporters saw a woman who had achieved everything she wanted without needing the amendment, which was precisely her argument.
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